The unimplementable demands of the UCU Left negotiators

UPDATE 25 March 2023: Here is a briefer Twitter thread along lines of my blog below, but from a somewhat different angle👇.

The UCU Left USS negotiators Deepa Driver and Marion Hersh have posted a new blog on their ‘Reverse USS!’ website. They write:

We must keep up strike action and industrial pressure on employers to ensure we get an unconditional written commitment to restore our benefits in full from 1 April 2024 at the very latest. This needs to cover both full future benefits and what we have lost up to then.

This written commitment must take the form of “a signed agreement with the employer and USS with no caveats or conditions” (emphasis in the original).

If, therefore, this commitment is to be secured now (or in the near future, e.g. by the end of June), it must not be conditional on any of the following:

1. Members expressing support of the rise of the DB/DC salary threshold in the statutorily required 60 day consultation which must take place before full restoration can be implemented. Therefore, a commitment to restore the salary threshold whatever the result of the consultation.

2. The pricing of benefit restoration in the consultation document on the valuation which USS is scheduled to issue by early July, and the employer response to this consultation document. Whatever the cost of contributions set forth in that consultation document, employers must commit, before they have had sight of this document, to restore benefits in full by 1 April 2024. Although their blog post doesn’t make this clear, I assume that employers would be required to absorb any rise in contributions which USS deems necessary to restore benefits in full. Member contributions must not rise. Employers cannot therefore place any limits on the contributions they would be prepared to pay to restore benefits in full.

3. tPR not deeming the valuation unacceptable and taking enforcement action. USS must unconditionally commit now to restoring benefits in full on the basis of this valuation, whatever tPR’s response to that valuation.

4. Complexities regarding the unwinding of DC contributions into pensions above the £40k salary threshold between 2022–24. There must be an agreement now, whatever these complexities, to unwind these contributions by 1 April 2024.

5. Conformity with various legislative requirements and regulations (including a requirement about how members must not be affected unequally on the basis of certain characteristics). USS always includes such caveats regarding the need to confirm such conformity. But it must not do so now.

6. Submission by 1 April 2024 of the 2023 valuation on which the schedule of contributions to restore benefits would be based.

7. Etc., etc.

There is no chance that USS will provide the unconditional agreement demanded of this proposal. Such refusal would be based on sound legal advice.

Employers would also have excellent grounds to refuse to provide a commitment which is unconditional on any of the above — e.g., unconditional on the result of the member consultation.

So this is a proposal to “keep up strike action and industrial pressure” for as long as it takes to secure unconditional commitments that USS would refuse to provide, and on sound legal advice, and which employers also have excellent grounds to refuse to provide.

I cannot think of a better way to demobilise members. This in spite of the fact that they maintain that failure to nail down these commitments “will demobilise the very campaign that members need to defend their pensions”.

As their blog post has been extensively edited and revised since the 19 March posting date, here is an archived version of their post on which I comment above at time of the writing of this blog (21 March 2023, 9:56 GMT)